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Actor, born in Sweden on the 18th of September, 1905, died on the 15th of April, 1990.
Gay: N/A |
Lesbian: 6 out of 9 |
Trans: N/A |
Queer: N/A |
Garbo was bisexual.
Greta Garbo was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on the 18th of September, 1905 in Stockholm, Sweden to poor family. After her father’s death, she left school to go to work at age 14, eventually becoming a clerk at the PUB department store in 1920. She posed in several newspaper ads for the store, then in two one-reel commercials, How Not to Dress for the clothing department and Our Daily Bread for the bakery.
The exposure she got doing those ads for PUB got her cast in the short comedy Peter the Tramp in 1922, which was a great success in her budding film career, so much so that she decided to become a full-time actor and enrolled in Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre school. It was there that she met Mauritz Stiller, who cast her in her first feature film, The Saga of Gosta Berling, in 1924.
Stiller’s relationship to Garbo could be described as a svengali, using her to advance his image while continually making lofty promises that never materialized. This was hardly out of character for Stiller, who was in reality a violinist from Russia ducking out of the Russo-Japanese war in neutral Sweden, but he passed himself off as a famous German director and got enough people to believe him to successfully launch himself into becoming Sweden’s foremost film director.
Apart from her role as Greta Rumfort in G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street in 1925, she would act exclusively under Stiller’s direction in Sweden. He gave her the last name “Garbo” and, over their next two features, crafted her screen persona, taking her to Hollywood in hopes of gaining world renown as her director.
They signed with MGM and began work on Garbo’s first American picture, The Torrent, in 1926. During an age typified by strong typecasting (Theda Bara-like vamps, Lillian Gish-like virgins, Clara Bow-like flappers, etc.), Garbo defied simple one-word classification and the studio would often struggle in effectively casting her. Garbo’s Hollywood career was just beginning, but Stiller’s was already over. He was fired shortly after filming began on her second feature, The Temptress, still in 1926.
She would be cast opposite John Gilbert in many of her silents, such as Flesh and the Devil and, in 1928, A Woman of Affairs (a personal favorite of mine, I might add), both directed by Clarence Brown. Garbo was bisexual and romantically involved with numerous people of both sexes in Hollywood, including Louise Brooks and Claudette Colbert, but her longest and most publicized relationship was with Gilbert. The two were to be married in 1927, but Garbo stood Gilbert up at the altar, some say out of faithfulness to Mimi Pollak, her first love, who she had met back in Sweden at acting school and maintained constant contact with until her death.
With the introduction of talking pictures, Gilbert’s career was over but Garbo’s, even with her heavy accent, continued, if not as strong. Her first sound film was Anna Christie in 1930, and after it, she would star a year later in Mata Hari, Grand Hotel in 1932, the 1936 sound version of Camille, and finally Ninotchka in 1939.
During and after WWII, Hollywood films exported to Europe were no longer returning a profit. Garbo, who was more popular internationally than domestically, was especially hit. After being relegated to light comedies and other inconsequential films, she retired from the screen and lived a solitary, almost reclusive life in her New York apartment, withdrawing more and more from society as time went on.
Garbo died on the 15th of April, 1990.
Aliases
Films
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